Open, light and airy. 

That’s been the mantra of the new Powell Library design, and less than three months from expected building completion it’s already apparent inside the structure just how much larger and more open the space is compared to the previous building.

“The whole library was dark and just felt a little like a dungeon, and we wanted the opposite here,” said Karen Horner, director of the Park County Library system.

The library, which is lined along most of the walls with windows where there isn’t Wyoming wood paneling, is expected to be open to the public in early spring, Horner said, as she stood in her hard hat inside the main collections space alongside Groathouse Project Manager Andrea Richardson last week.  

That gives library staff a few months to get new furniture situated and move books and other materials over from its temporary home at Homesteader Hall in the Park County Fairgrounds. 

It’ll take time, because in addition to the new space being more open, it’s also going to be packed with more stuff. 

First and foremost, there will be space for many more books in the wide open main collections space in the center of the building under the vaulted ceiling. The space will include a large, locally made wooden collections desk as something of a centerpiece. 

“There’ll be more books, materials, more of everything here,” Horner said. 

And going from her estimate of roughly 6,000 square feet of usable space in the prior building to 14,000 square feet of space allows for a wider variety of areas than before, even if, as Richardson noted, it may not look quite so spacious from the outside.

“We’ll be able to have the meeting room, the activity room and the study rooms … so we can do a lot more programming, which we’ve been doing, and then have people be able to use the space,” Horner said. 

There will also be separate spaces off of the main collection area for the children’s and teen libraries. And, along the Third Street front of the building space has been allocated where patrons can sit on stools at a long desk while they look out onto the street.

The new space, which includes working spaces as before behind the collections table, also has more for the employees, including a break room, something they didn’t have in the old library. 

The Friends of the Library also have a dedicated space inside the front entrance, a small retail front to sell books. 

While there are carved out spaces, much is open, which Horner said will enable future generations to change the library more easily, as opposed to the previous building which she said was far too divided to easily change. 

“This way, as things evolve with times, it won’t be like in 40 years … ‘we need a new library now.’ It doesn’t work anymore,” she said. 

The open space also allows few librarians the ability to monitor a large area in case of staffing shortages. 

“We’re super excited,” Horner said, noting the great working relationship between the county, which donated more than $3 million to the $11 million project, and contractor Groathouse. “It’s been a long time coming having this library.”